Politics & Power Quote by Louise Slaughter

A veteran legislator’s most effective move is to make policy feel like a moral obligation, and Louise Slaughter does it in one clean sentence. “We have a responsibility” frames stem cell research not as a partisan preference but as a civic duty, implicitly casting opponents as ducking an ethical call. It’s the language of stewardship: government as the actor that must do the grown-up thing when markets, institutions, or social discomfort slow progress.

The phrase “promote stem cell research” is carefully chosen. Slaughter isn’t arguing over the lab bench; she’s arguing over the pipeline that decides whether science becomes medicine: funding priorities, regulatory permission, and political cover. “Promote” leaves room for coalition-building and incremental wins while still sounding urgent. It’s a pragmatic verb with moral muscle.

Her subtext sits in the clause that follows: “could lead to treatments and cures.” The word “could” is a hedge that signals scientific honesty, but it also functions as rhetorical insulation against the inevitable charge of hype. She’s not promising miracles; she’s insisting that the possibility is reason enough to act.

The closing appeal - “diseases affecting millions of Americans” - turns a bioethics debate into a mass-public problem. It widens the audience beyond patients and researchers to families, voters, and taxpayers. Contextually, Slaughter is speaking into the long culture-war shadow over embryonic stem cells, where “life” and “choice” arguments can freeze policy. Her sentence reroutes that conflict through an American political staple: reducing suffering at scale, with government as the enabling instrument.